The art of contemplation

(Nimue)

I regularly frame posts with the word ‘contemplating’ in the title, but what oes this mean in practice? I thought I’d share a bit about what I’m doing on that score.

I’m constantly reading, learning from others and exploring ideas. Every so often a particular issue or concept looms large for me and I invest time in it. This often means deliberate reading around, and time spent reflecting. I can have this going on for weeks in the background before I’ll feel ready to write about it. I find it helpful to take my time when I’m grappling with an idea and bringing together different aspects of my own experience.

For example, the recent co-dependency post owes a lot to a conversation with a friend back in July, and then seeing other friends using the term in different ways of Facebook. The first conversation led me to doing some reading around, to establish both the common usage of the term and that it isn’t a formal diagnosis. I spent some time reflecting on how that all related to my own experiences. To get to a blog post there’s an additional stage of sifting through what I’ve learned to see if there’s anything I might usefully share here.

Often, the questions I ask are very personal during the contemplation process. I’m doing it because I’m trying to figure something out that relates to my own life. It’s rare that I end up playing with ideas in a more abstract way – usually there’s some specific application. Whether I share the personal elements of the journey varies – often I think it’s too personal and not likely to be useful, so I try and extrapolate to come up with something more broadly useful.

The co-dependency question was actually ‘am I co-dependent?’ It related to a previous relationship and the possibility that I had some unconscious reason for perpetuating a harmful situation. On reflection the answer was no. Given half a chance to create healthy and functional environments, that’s what I do, and I have plenty of evidence to support that. This has been part of a wider questioning about who and how I am, what I choose, what I am and have been responsible for, and how I might reconsider the past.

I find contemplation a necessary part of my learning process. I read a lot of non-fiction and I find it is necessary to spend time with ideas so as to consolidate what I’ve learned. The more complicated something is, the more time I need to spend absorbing and reflecting on new information. From what I’ve picked up studying psychology, this is normal for learning – that we need to work with material in order to embed it.

I often take quite a free form approach t contemplation – going over what I’ve learned in a way that allows new ideas to arise, and connections to be made with other things I’ve picked up. I look for patterns, and see what surfaces as potentially relevant in my own body of experience.

I don’t think it really matters how you approach the business of consolidating learning and contemplating experience. Doing it certainly does matter – this time is essential for processing experience and input, and integrating what we hope to learn into our minds so that if goes forward with us.